Confessions of an Oracle Database Junkie - Arup Nanda
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Tuesday, November 09, 2010

Tool to Present a Consolidated View of the Status of RMAN Backups

A very important area of database administration is backups which are essential to the availability of the databases. If you use RMAN to backup databases (as you should be doing), how will you ensure that all the database backups have successfully completed? One way of making sure that occurs is by going into each server and checking the backup log – a task not just tedious but often impractical considering the large number of databases we have. Is there an easy way – via a consolidated output of all databases?

The Tool

Yes, there is an easy way – by checking the catalog, assuming of course that you are using a catalog, as you should be. I developed this tool to extract the information from the catalog for each database. Since the repository may be different for each database being backed up, I used a view to union all the RC_* views from all the repositories on a common schema which I named RMAN_COMMON. Then I wrote a PL/SQL program to pull the report presenting the information on all databases together. Since my objective was to have a consolidated view of all the backups, whether they succeeded or not, I selected from multiple views to provide an indented output in case of failures to identify specifically which component failed. I will illustrate with an output shown below. The tool can be customized for number of days it reports. Here I have chosen for the last 2 days.

Here you can see the databases in the catalog – PROPRD, LIGPRD1, LIGPRD2 and SW1. The columns – “Start Time”, “End Time” and “Time Taken” – are self-explanatory. The “Output Size” shows the size of the backupset produced. The “Status” column shows the status of the job – the key to this report. If it shows “COMPLETE”, then all was well in the job. If it shows “FAILED” then lines below show what actually failed. For instance you can see on 8th Nov, incremental backup of one datafile of PROPRD failed. That one definitely needs investigating. You got all that important information in just one report. As you add all the databases into the same catalog, your reports will be more complete and expansive.

Construction

Now that you saw the result of the tool, let’s see the code behind it. First I created a user – RMAN_COMMON:

We need just three views from the repositories; so this user needs to be granted select privileges on those only. As SYS user, grant these:

grant select on rman_PROPRD.rc_rman_backup_job_details to rman_common;
grant select on rman_LIGPRD11.rc_rman_backup_job_details to rman_common;
grant select on rman_LIGPRD21.rc_rman_backup_job_details to rman_common;
grant select on rman_11g.rc_rman_backup_job_details to rman_common;
--
grant select on rman_PROPRD.rc_rman_backup_subjob_details to rman_common;
grant select on rman_LIGPRD11.rc_rman_backup_subjob_details to rman_common;
grant select on rman_LIGPRD21.rc_rman_backup_subjob_details to rman_common;
grant select on rman_11g.rc_rman_backup_subjob_details to rman_common;
--
grant select on rman_PROPRD.rc_rman_status to rman_common;
grant select on rman_LIGPRD11.rc_rman_status to rman_common;
grant select on rman_LIGPRD21.rc_rman_status to rman_common;
grant select on rman_11g.rc_rman_status to rman_common;

Of course, you will need to customize the above script to add more repositories as you add them.

Next, you will create the views by selecting from the corresponding views from individual repositories. Instead of creating a view with all the columns, I chose only a few columns. This will help us in combining the views from 10g and 11g where the columns could be different.

This is the PL/SQL code in the file status.sql. You can adjust the value of the constant l_days to generate the report for as many days as you want. When you run the script it shows the status of the RMAN jobs in last 2 days.

Hope you find this useful. As always, any feedback will be highly appreciated.